The big news of this month is that Ingrid has stopped sucking her thumb during the daytime. Some days before Christmas I mentioned a couple of times that around Christmas she should stop sucking it, because it’s no good for her teeth. (She knows that’s true because the dentist said so.) She remembered it and took it more seriously than I had hoped, and reminded me on Christmas Eve that she would stop sucking her thumb.

And she did. That was pretty much it. The first few days I had to remind her at times, and sometimes she really wanted to, but managed to do without. I was really proud of her, and she was very proud when she told everybody at nursery. Since then, no problems whatsoever. She still needs/wants the thumb when falling asleep, and I’m willing to let that be for now. An unexpected but very welcome side effect is that she rarely wants to touch my cleavage any more. I guess the two activities together were some sort of effort to recreate the feeling of breastfeeding.

The first half of this month was dominated by Christmas: waiting for it, and then getting presents. The second half was, in turn, dominated by one of the above-mentioned presents: a board game. This was the first board game in our house, and Ingrid absolutely loves it. We have played it almost every day, sometimes several times.

It’s one of those games where you follow a path, rolling a die to decide how many steps to take, and special events happen at various places on the board. (Wikipedia tells me these are called “roll-and-move games”.) This particular game is called Drakguldet (The Dragon’s Gold), and the aim is to gather pieces of gold. On some squares you get a marker for a piece of gold, on some you lose one, on some you double your hoard, on some you have to run forward or fall back, etc. Ingrid is actually not that interested in getting the most gold, but would rather be the first one to reach the finish.

Ingrid loved the game from the moment she saw it. And it seems to be just right for her. During the first few evenings the challenge was to get her to follow the rules. She’s well aware of the concept of taking turns, so that wasn’t a problem. But there are also rules such as “you have to move forward all the time, not backwards” and “no, you cannot skip squares you don’t like” – not to mention “when counting steps, you don’t count the square you’re standing on”.

Naturally there is a lot of counting going on here: of pips on the die, of steps, and of pieces of gold. This has exposed some interesting things about her maths skills.

  • She doesn’t subitize any amounts larger than about 3 – she almost always counts them.
  • She cannot reliably tell the difference between the 4 and the 5 on a die, and either guesses or counts the pips (but always recognizes the 6).
  • She cannot translate numbers greater than 3 between languages. When she counts to 10 pieces of gold (in Estonian) and I ask her what that is in Swedish, she is totally lost. Four? Five? I guess it’s like being asked to translate 1001011 from binary to decimal. I can do it but not off the top of my head.
  • She doesn’t miscount when she physically moves objects, but she can easily miscount when just pointing at them, whenever the finger moves faster than the mouth.

Ingrid has also discovered that houses have numbers. She knows the number of our house (and the street name, although if a stranger asked her for it I’m not sure if theyd’ be able to decipher her pronounciation). On our way home in the afternoon, once we’ve made our way from the big road to the small streets, we stop briefly at almost every gate to look for the house number. She’s learned that the numbers can be found on the post box, or the gate post, or sometimes the house itself. However the number on the garbage can is not the house number. She cannot always tell which number is which (so I help) but she’s got 1, 2, 3, 5 and 0 down pat. And she knows that 2 and 2 side by side means twenty-two, and 1 and 2 is twelve (although 2 and 1 sometimes also make twelve) etc.

Continuing further on the topic of numbers, the number after twenty is “done!” because that’s what we used to say when counting was the only way to get her to allow us to brush her teeth. In fact it is “fourteen, eighteen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty, done!”.

Another game she played and liked was Memory, also known as Pairs. She’s encountered cardboard versions of it before, but this was an electronic one (at IKEA) which was more interesting and got her to pay more attention. She played it quite systematically: turn over a card, and then try all other cards against it until she finds a match. A, B, A, C, A, D, A, E etc.

Sometimes she likes typing on my laptop. I put Caps Lock on and turn up the font size to 48, and she types. She likes letters, sometimes numbers, but not punctuation marks or other weird wiggles. She knows the Backspace and Enter keys, and sort of kind of understands the arrow keys, too.

There’s more and more pretend play going on, now. All kinds of things are suddenly alive. Soft toys, of course, but also game pieces that must go to sleep, and pieces of potato that want to run away from the dragon and hide in Ingrid’s mouth. She likes to be a bear, herself (and I must be mother bear and we must go to sleep underneath the duvet because it is winter, and then it is spring and she wakes me).

Like last month, she likes to pretend she’s a baby, and her dolls are often babies, too. Babies want to be with mummy, and babies cannot do anything themselves, and they say “ääh” when they want something because they cannot talk.

There was a brief period when she was keeping a running commentary on everything she did – “now I will go and sit on the chair and have some milk” but that passed. There was also a period when she’d tell sing random stories, with a random melody – “when the bear was in the woods and picked berries there was another bear that came and he wanted to join” but that also passed. There were also several periods when Ingrid had a runny nose and would, at unpredictable points, insert the word “snor!” or “nohu!” in her speech (meaning “snot”, meaning “please wipe my nose”) without even changing the tone of her voice – “I took a book and now I want to read it snot!” and those also passed.

On the social side, Ingrid’s developed a clear understanding of the fact that others have moods and wants, and also of social expectations. When I sound curt or impatient, she asks me if I’m happy (“Kas sa oled rõõmus?). She asks about the moods of cartoon characters, and I explain that Donald Duck is looking sad / scared / anxious / angry / excited / impatient, as well as why. Her vocabulary in that area is clearly expanding.

She knows what “please” and “thank you” are for, and is willing to use them at times. She’s also wise enough to know that these words make me happy, so when she knows I am annoyed with her behaviour, she suddenly becomes extra polite.

And yet that understanding only goes so far and no further. A new and frequent feature in her conversations is a categorical “but you must!”. I tell her I cannot play just now / don’t want to sit by her side while she’s on the potty / will not read for her until I’ve finished cooking dinner. Her response is always “but you must!”, and she doesn’t really listen to any of my replies.

Favourite foodstuffs: julmust and, still, liver pâté. And cookies. Liver pâté is by far her favourite sandwich spread, and almost every dinner is concluded by a dessert of one or two cookies
Favourite colour: green. She appears to have decided, one day, that she likes green. Now almost every day she tells me that she likes green things. I think she ate broccoli today only because it was green.
Favourite movie: all kinds of Disney classics.

Favourite books: varied; the ones I can recall now include Nicke Nyfiken på sjukhuset (Curious George Goes to the Hospital), Mattias ja mamma, Mamma Mu, När Findus var liten och försvann.

Not favourite activity: sledding. I thought all children loved sledding, but Ingrid is not particularly interested. She does it at nursery, but when we’ve suggested it during the Christmas holidays, she’s declined.

Random observation: she moves like a child and not a toddler now. I remember noticing half a year ago, back in July when we were in Estonia, how she ran like a toddler, with her hips and legs moving sort of stiffly, with a bit of a waddle. That’s all gone now.

PS: The solution to our afternoon nursery pickup problems was to make it into a game. I would suggest or try to put her clothes on wrong – socks on her head, mittens on feet, fleecy trousers around her neck – and she would squeal with laughter and correct me. The fun is slowly going out of this game, there’s no squealing any more, but she still reminds every day that I should put her clothes on wrong.